Just finished this commission for a painting of Tobey, the furry friend of Alan’s co-worker Melinda. Last month, Alan was transporting an earlier painting, The Big Yawn, to its new owner at his work. Melinda spotted it and asked about a commission for her nursery.

We started by reviewing a few dozen photos, and she narrowed it down to six for me to look through in more detail. I picked three and did quick Photoshop mockups on different canvas shapes. One in particular had great lighting and detail, so I adjusted the angle and gave it a close crop to better match the intense staring-at-something-behind-you look cats often have.

The color layering (including the awful blue stage every painting goes through) worked to particularly good effect in the eyes. The fuzzy blurring of the white areas also helped soften the rest to make the details stand out more. Usually on these, especially on the paintings of people, I’ll just paint the edges black if I’m planning on adding a frame. I opted to paint around the edges on this one – so every layer I painted that you see here I also painted on each of the four edges (where applicable). It’s good practice in working out what looks right from different sides to ensure that changes in viewing angles won’t make the perspective look odd.

This month’s Two Buck Tuesday at Kaleid Gallery in SJ featured an opportunity for figure drawing amongst the regular mix of demonstrations, musicians, and artsy happenings. Since I missed the last two, I was glad to get a chance to go to this one. This evening had a first-time model, Katherine, whom the organizer had spotted at a steampunk convention and invited to model.

I wasn’t in a charcoal mood, so for this evening I used a few new Neuland markers and a basic drawing pad (Strathmore Drawing Medium, 14″x17″). The markers are great! I mostly used the fineOne Outliner (refillable!) and the feel of the nib and quality of the ink made me draw more deliberately with it. I’m very happy with the results and will probably use this from here on out. The highlights on the staff sketch are from the fineOne Brush tip with ink #803, a nice green/brown color that happened to match her fabric. I haven’t sketched much other than foliage with that one, but now that I see it’s a pretty good pairing with the black, I’ll use it with it again.

Here’s the full set of vinyl toys & musician portraits I made for the Hues/Muse artist takeover at Chromatic Coffee last month. A few sold, so for the ones that didn’t I’m looking into either potential retail spots in SJ or online (possibly Etsy?) to hang a shingle & sell the rest. If you see any you’re interested in or if you’d like something in a similar style, let me know!

Here’s a preview of two projects-in-progress that will be for sale! In May I’m joining artist Celeste Young for an artist takeover of Chromatic Coffee. The theme of our show is Hues/Muse, a collection of works organized by the moods of eleven different colors. I’m working on ’em all now and will post both sets once they’re ready.

I’ve been in the mood to do more illustration, so the first set of goods are portraits of musicians. It includes the only suitable choice for purple: Prince.

The second set of goods are a bunch of custom vinyl figures. I’m painting/decorating them in different styles of arts/crafts. The green choice is this Topiary creature. Maybe I should name them!

The opening reception is Thursday May 7th from 6-9pm, and they’ll be shown for the month of May. More details to come on Chromatic Coffee‘s Facebook page!

I did some quick graphic design work for Hello Good Pie in prep for their annual “Kiss for Pie” event this Valentine’s Day.

Our friend Cordelia started this delightful event based on an event we encountered in college. We all went to Cal Poly SLO which used to have an ice cream shop on campus called Julian’s. Every Valentine’s Day they’d give away free ice cream to couples that would kiss. Cordelia is carrying forward this tradition in Norway by giving away little pies to couples.

Picking up the assets & copy created by Jørgen, I picked a few fonts to perk up the copy. The body font is Arvo which is a serif font by Anton Koovit (via Google Fonts). The fancy font is Amatic which is a handdrawn font by Vernon Adams (via Font Squirrel). Amatic reminded me of a romantic comedy font. The text colors are sampled from the logo.

For the versions with one large photo, I wanted a more decorative edge between the photo and text area. I tried an edge that looked like scrollwork but it ended up not looking right. Instead, I picked a simpler “rick rack”-style edge that evokes handmade valentines.

Last but not least: I was looking for a way to simplify the grid of photos. I ended up using two different approaches here: either interspersing the “Kiss for Pie” text, or alternating the appearance with a simpler black-and-white style. Enjoy!

Since starting the Statement series I’ve been on the lookout for interesting variations on white fabrics. It occurred to me that there are a few occupations that include uniforms or articles of clothing that fit the bill. My friend Will, who currently pursuing an MD/PhD, has the accoutrement of the practice and kindly posed for me.

This was a fun shoot because it touched upon some of the style I use for user interviews for my experience design projects. I asked him to imagine he was conducting a patient interview and tell me about how it happens. It was interesting to see how he stayed attentive while taking notes (and the occasional teasing about me taking photos). The notes he was jotting down related to a patient interview he’d conducted in a class earlier that week.

When painting this one I tinkered with the order of what to paint when and am pretty happy with the results. I end up using a dry brush type of technique on both skin and the white fabric to eliminate hard edges. Knowing this, I worked on the skin and shirt first (after the initial tones) so I could allow myself a little overspray that I could tighten up when refining the background.

Working on the skin early is also a good way to reduce that antsy low point that comes during a half-finished painting. If the skin looks good, it’s okay to have the abstract/unfinished look to the clothing or the background. The core of the figure grounds the whole thing. I’ll probably play around with this more in the future when I’m ready to mix figurative work with other styles.

I particularly like the chiaroscuro effect in this one. The lighting adds an extra gravitas to an interaction that already feels serious. This painting feels familiar and friendly to me because I know who it is but I imagine it’ll feel very different for anyone else viewing it.

This year, instead of spending my creative energies on a holiday card (doh) I focused on creating a “thank you” gift for Make It Legit. What started out as a theme for my blog became my business name when I decided to strike out on my own this last year. Though there are many people to thank for their kinds words and support, there were a handful of people (okay, maybe two handfuls) that were pivotal in making this a success. These are the people who alerted me to opportunities, stood by me as references, and/or were my key client contacts that made it happen. I wanted to thank them properly at the end of the year.

This was one of those ideas that popped into my head nearly fully formed. I think it may have been my subconscious harking back to the first assignment I had at my first post-college job: creating stamp graphics to use to indicate spec states (draft, final, etc.). I tracked down that file so you can bear witness to the folly of those unnecessary drop shadows…I will only say in my defense that the team liked and used them, and they looked pretty reasonable at the time.

I wanted to make some kind of physical good that would be interesting-looking and potentially useful. An old style wood-handled rubber stamp fit the bill. I got these made at Simon’s Stamps where I also bought simple stamp pads. Gotta make ’em usable right out of the package! I hadn’t ever thought of a brand color for Make It Legit since my logo is black and white, so I picked the “Grasshopper” ink because it was a cheery shade of green. It’s natural, it’s positive, it’s “go”. Why not?

The card is designed in Illustrator, and after a few fruitless attempt to make my printer work with cardstock I took it down to Kinkos instead. I mostly eyeballed the size to leave a reasonable amount of room for the LEGIT stamp. The mat cutter makes clean lines very easy, and a bone folder gave it the proper folded-card edge. The actual stamping was more challenging than I expected to uniformly land ’em centered and at a reasonably jaunty angle.

Originally I was going to send these in bubble-wrap envelopes, but I wasn’t happy with the different ways I found to bundle the stamp, pad, and card. At one point I had cut cardboard squares and pseudo-shrinkwrapped them. I took a stamp and pad out for one last attempt to find the right-sized box. With the actual pieces in hand, I realized they’d fit perfectly in CD/DVD mailers. Plus: the way they fold means there’s a lid to open for a nice reveal of what’s inside. Double plus: by sheer coincidence, the cards I’d made fit perfectly in the opening to be seen first before discovering the rest of the contents.

It was pretty involved but well worth it. I’m grateful for the people that made this happen, and am happy to already have a few folks on my 2015 list!

Got this lovely late afternoon shot for the latest painting, part of the Statement series.

My friend Teresita is renting a room in a house with this fabulous master bathroom. The windows overlook trees surrounding the property, and was too good to pass up. She had a white (well, cream) towel, so we tried a bunch of shots here. This was one of the last ones we took, and the best of the bunch due to this great casual hand gesture.

The sun was low enough to highlight just the towel. That towel highlight had particularly nice lighting that matched the tealight. The tiles also had some interesting reflections that took a little effort to figure out – some were from the sun, some from the tealight, and others are reflected light from her. Overall, it’s pretty close to how it looked except that I ended up toning down the wallpaper a bit. It was some kind of 80’s glamorous and very, very shiny. Quite happy with how this turned out!

Gadget testing time – here’s some sketches I made with Adobe’s hardware/software offering for tablets, the Ink stylus and Adobe Sketch app. Overall the heft of the stylus is quite nice, and the app is a reasonable minimalist sketching app.

Despite my background, I generally avoid making art on tablets because I end up disappointed with both the feel of making it and the fidelity of the results. For the feel, Adobe Sketch has a bit of pressure sensitivity…which does help, and is a feat given the lack of support for this on iPads. The results, though, are similar to other apps in this class. I can’t un-see the frequent hallmarks of digital art: consistent brush edging, unnaturally uniform transparency, recognizable filters, excess dodge/burn, smoothed-out vectors. I always find myself wishing I’d spent the time with a sketchbook instead.

Knowing that, I thought I should come up with alternate uses more suitable to its limitations and a little less focused on creating an artifact. Here I focused mostly on loose studies of lighting and color to exercise my perception of the colors a bit more. These were sketched at Jillian’s studio earlier this year.